Decoys of great variety in construction and purpose are available to be employed as lures for hunting and to a lesser extent to attract wild animals for animal observation and/or to retrieve biological or other samples for further study. For example, wild birds, fish and other animals are often captured, e.g., through anesthesia, and banded, provided with radio emitting tags or otherwise distinguished from the flock, school or herd for the purpose of later tracking or identification. More frequently, decoys are employed during hunting season to emulate a waterfowl or a group of waterfowl at a location suitable for example, for feeding, in order to lure migratory waterfowl to within suitable shooting range and subsequent recovery of downed waterfowl carcasses.
While decoys often provide a life-like appearance, it is also desirable to have the decoy move in the water such that it emulates the swimming motion of a duck, or other waterfowl, in a life-like fashion. Many attempts have been made to so motivate decoys. However, the resulting decoys are often designed such that they will tend to exhibit fixed or regular swimming, feeding or diving motion, unlike the actual random motion of, for example, a duck.
Some previous decoys have employed an apparatus for causing the decoy to repeatedly traverse a fixed tether or string. Hence, the decoy traverses back and forth along the tether string in a fashion which is atypical of the motion of a wild duck. Other decoys use manually preset rudders which cause the decoy to traverse a set circular path on the water surface. Of course, this is unlike the random motion of real ducks.
In order to provide more lifelike swimming motions, some previous decoys have used radio-control technology to direct the decoy motion and operate specific subsystems simulating such actions as feeding, anchoring and game retrieval. Each decoy is controlled individually from a dedicated transmitter, requiring the full concentration of one hunter to the exclusion of searching for inbound live game. However, a large number of decoys are typically used during a hunt. Using anywhere from one dozen to ten dozen decoys is not uncommon when duck hunting. The number of decoys used is typically even greater, sometimes over twenty dozen, when hunting for geese. Therefore, radio controlled technology, regardless of the opportunity to control a variety of motions, is generally contraindicated for migratory waterfowl hunting.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a decoy or decoy system that does not suffer from the deficiencies of the prior art.